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John McCarthy
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John McCarthy

Computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” and invented Lisp

4 September 1927 – 24 October 2011 United States Verified by our editors
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Lived
84 yrs
1927 – 2011
Works listed
2
Programming language, Paper
Honours
4
Most recent 2003
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John McCarthy was an American computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, created the Lisp programming language and helped develop time-sharing computers. He founded the Stanford AI Laboratory and received the Turing Award in 1971.

Biography

Early life

McCarthy was born in Boston to immigrant parents, grew up partly in Los Angeles and taught himself university mathematics as a teenager. He studied at Caltech and earned a PhD in mathematics at Princeton in 1951.

Naming artificial intelligence

In a 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College, McCarthy introduced the phrase “artificial intelligence”. The 1956 workshop he organised with Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester is regarded as the birth of the field.

Lisp and time-sharing

At MIT in 1958 he designed Lisp, a language built around lists and recursive functions that became the main language of AI research for decades and introduced ideas such as garbage collection. He also proposed time-sharing, letting many users share one computer interactively, which led to modern multi-user systems.

Stanford

He moved to Stanford in 1962 and founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), which worked on robotics, computer vision and logic-based reasoning. He received the Turing Award in 1971, the Kyoto Prize in 1988 and the US National Medal of Science in 1990. He died in 2011.

Timeline

  1. 1927

    Born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States

  2. 1955

    Writes the Dartmouth proposal naming AI

  3. 1956

    Dartmouth workshop

  4. 1958

    Designs Lisp at MIT

  5. 1962

    Joins Stanford University

  6. 1971

    Receives the Turing Award

  7. 1988

    Kyoto Prize

  8. 1990

    National Medal of Science

  9. 2011

    Died, aged 84

Notable works

  • 1958

    Lisp Programming language

  • 1960

    Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine Paper

    The paper that introduced Lisp.

Awards and honours

  • Turing Award

    1971

  • Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology

    1988

  • National Medal of Science

    1990

  • Benjamin Franklin Medal

    2003

Did you know?

  1. 1

    Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in wide use, after Fortran.

  2. 2

    He predicted in the 1960s that computing would one day be sold like a public utility — an idea close to today’s cloud computing.

  3. 3

    He was an early participant in online discussion forums.

Connections

Related people

Also born on 4 September

Frequently asked

Who is John McCarthy?

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, created the Lisp programming language and helped develop time-sharing computers. He founded the Stanford AI Laboratory and received the Turing Award in 1971.

When did John McCarthy die?

John McCarthy died on 24 October 2011 at the age of 84.

Where is John McCarthy from?

John McCarthy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

What is John McCarthy known for?

John McCarthy is best known for Coining “artificial intelligence”; the Lisp language; time-sharing; Turing Award 1971.

What awards has John McCarthy received?

Notable honours include Turing Award (1971), Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology (1988), National Medal of Science (1990), Benjamin Franklin Medal (2003).

References

  1. John McCarthy (computer scientist) — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  2. John McCarthy (computer scientist) — Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  3. John McCarthy (computer scientist) — Hindi Wikipedia. Wikipedia (Hindi). Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  4. Official website. www-formal.stanford.edu. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  5. John McCarthy (computer scientist) (Q92739) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.

Includes material from the Wikipedia article “John McCarthy (computer scientist)”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more

External links

Official website Website Wikipedia
Filed under Artificial intelligenceLispStanford UniversityTuring Award Computer ScientistProfessor

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“John McCarthy.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/john-mccarthy

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